Nocix

What Nocix actually is

Nocix is a Kansas City bare-metal shop with a specific and honest identity: cheap dedicated servers, unmanaged, on its own network, in its own building. The company was formerly known as DataShack and operates out of its own private data center in North Kansas City, Missouri — including the facility at 1530 Swift that anchors the Kansas City Internet Exchange. Its sister presence at KCIX is not a marketing detail: Nocix runs AS33387 with an open peering policy, and the exchange it helps operate lists Wholesale Internet (AS32097) on the same 200 Gbps fabric next door. This is a family of long-running Midwestern hosting businesses, not a reseller of someone else's cloud.

The product is deliberately simple. Two order paths: instant-activation preconfigured boxes that are racked and online within minutes of an approved order, and custom builds assembled from available parts within two business days. Everything ships with full root SSH access, free setup, five usable IPv4 addresses, and a /64 IPv6 block. The plan catalog reads like a hardware archaeology exhibit — Core 2 Duo and i3/i5 preconfigs at the bottom, DDR3-era dual Xeon E5-2680v2 and E5-2695v2 boxes in the middle, dual E5-2696v3 and E5-2683v4 machines with 128 GB DDR4 and up to 36 cores/72 threads higher up, and custom builds topping out at a Ryzen Threadripper 3990X (64 cores/128 threads) or an i9-9900K. Enterprise listings extend to 256 GB RAM and large NVMe/SATA combinations, with OS choices including Ubuntu, CentOS 7, OpenSUSE, Proxmox VE, VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer, and Windows.

The headline is bandwidth. Standard allocation is a 1 Gbit unmetered port (the oldest preconfigs run 100 Mbit unmetered; at least one dual E5-2683v4 plan advertises a 10 Gbit port on 1 Gbit unmetered transfer). Our database entry says "10Gbps uplink available," which is true only in that limited sense — the everyday deal is 1 Gbit unmetered with five IPv4 addresses and a /64, which at these prices is still one of the better bandwidth deals in US dedicated hosting.

Pricing: what you really pay

Nocix's storefront advertises dedicated servers "from $25/mo" — our own listing's $39 entry figure is stale and we have filed it for correction. Plan-level prices render in the order interface rather than in the static tables, so the exact price-to-spec pairing needs a trip through the configurator; the high-performance tier showed a deploy-now price of $84.00 per month while we researched this, and a custom dual-Xeon build was listed at $80.00 per month (out of stock at the time). Setup is free across the board, and the models are plain monthly rentals — no annual lock-in theater, no seat licensing.

What that money buys is unusual in the current market. A dual Xeon E5-2696v3 with 36 cores, 128 GB of RAM, and 2×1 TB SSDs on a 1 Gbit unmetered port costs less per month than a 4 vCPU shared VM from the big clouds, and the older preconfigs (dual E5-2680v2, 20 cores/40 threads, 128 GB, mixed SSD/HDD) are cheaper still. The catch is age: much of the fleet is two or three hardware generations behind, which means higher power draw, lower single-thread performance, and no warranty-era parts. For throughput-shaped work — storage boxes, caching proxies, game servers, VPN endpoints, build machines — the price-performance is excellent. For single-thread-sensitive production APIs, a modern Ryzen custom build at $80-ish per month is the smarter pick.

One more context note worth having: Nocix describes itself as a VPS and dedicated provider, so there is a virtual-server line beneath the bare metal, and the family resemblance to Wholesale Internet, the Kansas City operator listed on the same KCIX fabric, matters when you evaluate long-term stability. These are small, closely held Midwestern companies with decades of local presence, not venture-funded platforms that might pivot. That is a quiet advantage when you are signing up for an unmanaged box you intend to run for years.

On our benchmarks page we only publish measured results for providers we have tested ourselves; Nocix is not one of them, so we will not quote performance figures. What we can point to is the company's own transparency: it publishes a live network page with per-upstream utilization, iperf3 (speedtest.nocix.net), 0.1/1/10 GB test files, and a public Ookla server. Providers confident in their network do that; providers hiding congestion do not.

Performance & infrastructure

The network is the strongest part of the package. All Nocix facilities sit on a private, self-healing fiber ring into downtown Kansas City with fiber on diverse river crossings, running a Brocade-based design described as fully parallel and redundant. The network is dual-stacked IPv4/IPv6 end to end. Direct upstreams listed on the live network page include Cogent, Telia, Hurricane Electric, China Telecom, China Unicom, DE-CIX Dallas, DE-CIX New York, and KCIX itself, with public peering at KCIX, DE-CIX New York, DE-CIX Dallas, MICE (Minneapolis), DenverIX, and SIX (Seattle), and a claimed 500+ peered networks including Apple, Google Fiber, Microsoft, and Netflix.

For a Kansas City box, that is a genuinely good position: central US latency to both coasts, direct China Telecom/Unicom connectivity that most budget hosts lack, and enough peering that traffic stays off congested transit. It matches our listing's "US central location" claim and then some.

On physical infrastructure, Nocix runs its own facility with 24-hour on-site staff and states a target of responding to hardware support tickets within 10 minutes. DDoS protection exists but is modest: the company provides "2gbit of DDoS protection free of charge across our network," with additional levels promised "at a future date" — a page that has looked that way for a long time. Two gigabits absorbs nuisance floods and cheap amplification noise; it will not save you from a determined volumetric attack. Our listing's ddos-protection tag is right in spirit but should be read at that scale.

Where it falls short

Unmanaged means unmanaged. Nocix maintains the datacenter environment and the hardware; the operating system, security patching, backups, and everything above the metal is yours. There is no control panel, no snapshots product, and while the homepage gestures at "secure backup," no backup service is specified on the plan pages we read. Budget your own backup target from day one.

Second, there is no published uptime SLA that we could find — no guarantee percentage, no credit schedule. The company's reputation in the low-end dedicated community is solid and its network tooling suggests operational confidence, but if you need a contractual availability number for compliance, this is not your vendor. Third, hardware vintage cuts both ways: DDR3-era Xeons are cheap cores, not fast ones, and parts availability for older preconfigs depends on what is on the shelf. Several plans in the custom list showed as out of stock during our research. Fourth, the website is thin — plan prices are not cleanly published on static pages, documentation is essentially nonexistent beyond TOS/AUP, and support is ticket-based rather than consultative. Fifth, single location: Kansas City is a great central-US position and a poor one for Asia-Pacific or European users who care about latency.

Who should pick this

Our pick for US operators who want raw dedicated hardware per dollar: storage and backup boxes, CDN/cache nodes, game servers, VPN and proxy fleets, virtualization hosts for lab and staging environments, and anyone building a high-bandwidth service where 1 Gbit unmetered is the constraint that matters. The China Telecom and China Unicom direct upstreams also make it a reasonable central-US origin for services with meaningful mainland-China traffic — a combination you rarely get at this price.

We would not pick it for teams needing managed operations, an SLA, or modern single-thread performance out of the box. Those buyers should look at the automation-heavy hosts in our dedicated servers and managed cloud categories and pay the premium for a panel and a contract. But if you know Linux, run your own monitoring, and measure value in cores and gigabits per euro — or per dollar — Nocix is one of the most honest deals in the US market.

Key takeaways

• Kansas City bare metal, formerly DataShack, running its own facility and its own network (AS33387, KCIX anchor participant)
• Entry pricing from $25/month (our listed $39 is stale); high-performance tier seen at $84.00/month; free setup, monthly terms
• Standard allocation: 1 Gbit unmetered, 5 usable IPv4 addresses, /64 IPv6 — genuinely competitive; "10Gbps uplink" applies only to select plans
• Network is the highlight: dual-stacked, private self-healing fiber ring, direct Cogent/Telia/HE/China Telecom/China Unicom upstreams, 500+ peered networks, live utilization and iperf3 published
• Free DDoS protection is 2 Gbit only — nuisance-flood grade, not enterprise mitigation
• Unmanaged, no published uptime SLA, mixed-age hardware (DDR3-era Xeons up to Threadripper) — strong for sysadmins, wrong for teams wanting hand-holding

Sources

• https://www.nocix.net/
• https://www.nocix.net/about-us/
• https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/
• https://www.nocix.net/enterprise-dedicated-servers/
• https://www.nocix.net/network/
• https://www.nocix.net/ddos-protection
• https://www.nocix.net/custom-dedicated-servers
• https://kcix.net/participants.php